Archive for September, 2012

WordPress is an easy system to use to create new webpages. It does not have to be used only as a blog and, according to which template you choose, can be made to look like regular webpages.

As an administrator (these instructions are for an installed version of WordPress on a server and not the free system found at wordpress.com) you can go to Users > Add New to add the following types of users:

An administrator can change the theme or make sitewide changes, while different users have different rights, as explained here.

Adding Text

Probably the easiest way to create a post/page in WordPress is to first write it in Word, as its formatting copies well into WordPress, but other text editors can work fine as well and you will need to experiment with what works best for you.

Otherwise you can write, format and add pictures directly into WordPress using its toolbar:

You will see this after you select Posts > Add New.

The Upload/Insert on the top left is for adding images to your article, which will be explained in greater detail later.

You can hold the mouse still over the various icons to see what they do. In the top right you will notice the Show/Hide Kitchen Sink icon. Press that to expand the toolbar to the following:

You will now notice the Paste from Word button in the middle of the bottom/second row. This could help retain more of the formatting you prepare in Word, although still a lot of formatting does not copy, such as text colouring and indentations. You will need to experiment with what works and you can always select a block of text and format in WordPress (WP) once pasted in.

The advantage of working in a text editor like Word is you can write your articles offline, and it is generally a bit faster working offline than online.

Whether you have written your article online or copied in the text from a text editor, at any time you can press the HTML tab on the top right, to the right of the Visual tab (the default setting with the toolbars shown above). Pressing the HTML tab shows the following toolbar:

It will convert your text with pictures and formatting to html format. If you know how to program in this language you can fine tweak your page, which should over-ride the template’s default settings.

If you work online it is a good idea to occasionally press the Save Draft button in the Publish box:

There is nothing more annoying than to time-out on your page, or lose your internet connection, and lose half an hour or more of writing.

When copying from Word to WP (WordPress), sometimes line break (Shift+Enter) is better than Enter to start a new line (also the same if writing online directly in WordPress). A regular Enter could create a space to the next paragraph that you don’t want, while Shift+Enter will force there to be no space (like here:).
In Word you can replace all the Enter marks in a file (or of a section of text you select separately) by Searching and Replacing (Ctrl+h)

^p
with
^l

It looks like this in the Search and Replace window:

Usually on your toolbar there is an icon that looks like a backwards P, like at the end of this sentence in the picture below:

Pressing this icon shows all characters, such as spaces and tabs. When you press Shift+Enter instead of just Enter to start a new line, it is called a “line break” and the end of the line uses a different character, like shown in the picture below:

You can create a nicely formatted file in Word according to these formatting tips.

Checking progress

Now that you have added text, you might want to see how it will look online. In the Publish box mentioned above you can right mouse click on the Preview button and then choose Open Link in New Tab (could be worded differently in different browsers). This should open up what your page will look like online in a tab to the right. In Chrome you can press ctrl+pageup or ctrl+pagedown to quickly jump to a neighbouring tab (to the right or left). In other browsers it could be ctrl+tab or ctrl+shift+tab.

When you make some changes in your editing window, press Save Draft. Once the editing page starts to reload (which means that the changes are “alive” online), jump to your preview tab and press F5 (which refreshes/updates the window in most browsers).

Now you can jump back and forth quickly between the editing and preview tabs to see how your page will appear online, as you make changes.

Using Titles

To make it visually easier and more pleasant to read, it is a good idea to use headings.

If you press on the Paragraph button on your toolbar you get something like the following choice:

The administrator can set the default settings for these paragraph styles, but you might be able to override these if using the HTML tab toolbar.

People do not like to read long paragraphs and endless text, so using bullets and titles is a good way to break up your article into easily consumable blocks. Treat your reader like a customer, who may get impatient and go elsewhere if reading your article is not a pleasant and worthwhile enough experience. After all, if you’re going to spend the time to write an article, might as well spend some time to make sure more people will be likely to read it.

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If writing in Word, in the menu use Tools > Customize > Keyboard button to get to this window:

If you press on Format in the Categories box and then ApplyHeading1, you can put the mouse cursor into the “Press new shortcut key” to choose one that you like. Or you can use the default keys in the Current Keys box. I like to use Alt+1, 2 and 3 for headings 1, 2 and 3. It is a quick and easy way to prepare your article, as the heading styles transfer to WP correctly when copying from Word.

Weblinks

An interesting, useful and informative article usually has weblinks within it. Google also likes this and well-targetted outbound links (not too many on the page) will help push up your page in the rankings to draw in more readers.

If writing online in WP, select the text you want to link out from. Once you have selected some text the Insert/Edit Link button in the middle of the first/top row of your toolbar becomes pressable, and the following window pops up once you press it:

If writing your article offline in Word (weblinks copy properly into WP), to add a link first select the text you want to outlink from and then press ctrl+k (or Insert > Hyperlink from the menu). On doing so the following window will appear:

You can copy the web address in the Address field at the bottom.

The Bookmark tab is for linking within the same page, but does not transfer when copied into WP. If you want to do that you will probably have to program it in the HTML tab of your article editing window.

Once you have copied in your web address you can press Target Frame and choose New Page. When a person clicks on such a link, it will open the page in a new tab. This way they are not taken away from your page and potentially not find their way back. They can study the material you suggested in a separate tab, and then come back to your tab and resume reading your article once done.

If you instead want the link to be to an email address, just press the Email Address button along the left (the default should be Existing File or Web Page as shown above) and punch in the email address you want to the letter to be sent to.

If you want to create a default email subject (to help inform the recipient that the email is in response to your article), you can press the HTML tab in the editing window, whereby the code is as follows:

The “write to me” is the text of the link and you can use whatever wording you want.

Inserting Pictures

As you can see from this page you are reading, it is much nicer to provide explanatory or appealing pictures within the text of your article. For this simply press the Upload/Insert link above left of your toolbar, which will make the following window appear:

If you want to insert a picture from the web you can press the From URL tab above, or Media Library if the administrator has created a big library of pictures on the WP account for this purpose.

Otherwise, if uploading from your computer, the best is to press the Select Files button in the centre, which will bring you to the following window (once the picture has been completely uploaded:

Here is an explanation of each field you can fill in and why you might want to fill them:

Title – good for search engine optimization. Ideally you want it to match the title of your page (explained later under Search Engine Optimization Tips) but add a different number each time.

Alternate Text – this is the text that pops up if you hold your mouse over a picture (doesn’t work in all browsers). It should be the same as the Title above and very important for SEO (search engine optimization – how to get your pages to the top of google’s and other search engines’ search results – the higher the ranking, the more people will find and read your article).

Pictures of my travels (click on pic for more), with alignment to right of text.

Caption – this will appear below the picture on your page, as an explanation of it, and should be useful for the reader. You can leave it blank if you do not want a caption or description for the reader.

Description – not sure but you can keep the same as Caption, or just ignore.

Link URL – if you want the reader to be taken to another page when they click on your picture. This can be useful for promotional purposes, such as by linking to your photographer’s profile.

Alignment – where within your text you want to place your picture and how you want it to appear. First you need to place your mouse cursor in your text before starting this entire process. If you choose Center it will end in the middle of the page. If you choose Left or Right the text will wrap around it nicely, like some of the examples on this page. When you preview what your page will look like online it will help you decide where in the article you want to put your pictures and how they should appear. This is important, because the more visually pleasant your page is to read, the more likely people will read it, which will also push your page up in the search engine rankings, as explained below.

Size – and finally you can select the size. Ideally you should resize your pictures yourself and choose Full Size. This is because, if your picture is very big, it can slow down the page’s download time and again affect whether you readers will want to stay on the page and wait. For this it would be good to read the resize digital pictures page.

Once done, press Insert into Post, Save Draft, and check out how the Preview looks. You can edit all these things any time.

Choose a Category

Before publishing your page (you can also do this later if you forgot), choose an appropriate category, assuming the administrator created some. If the website is about fish, perhaps there is a recipe section, a ‘how to fish’ section, ‘how to prepare your fish’ section/category and so on. By placing your article in the right category, it will help readers to find your page if they will be browsing for articles by category.

Make your sell

At the end of your article it is a good idea to “make your sell”, if you have any. Perhaps you just want to write an article for the benefit of the community, with absolutely no benefit to yourself. But if you would like to profit from all your

Tuktuk in Koh Phangan, Thailand

hard work, at the end of the article is the best place to link to yourself. Sure, within your article you can link to some of your pages, such as “To check out my awesome pictures of some of the large fish I have caught, go here.” Make your article more interesting by linking to useful pages, and why not give yourself a little sell? But you want to make your biggest pitch at the end of your article. Think of the reader. They just read your article, found it interesting, and now what? Do they go back to a previous page? This is the ideal time to lead them somewhere. Sure, your WordPress can have a plugin to automatically show Related Posts at the bottom of each article, but for a real sale it is better to write a targeted note at the bottom of the article. Such as: “Click the following link if you would like to check out more of my tips on fishing.” You can have a few such recommendations where you would like to guide the reader further. Obviously it should be related to the content of the article, and if you had already linked to your “sales” page from within the article, it doesn’t matter. The important point is to offer your reader at least one interesting option where they can continue reading, once they have finished reading your article. If the reader has read to the very end of your article it means they are interested and you have already established credibility in their eyes, so it is the perfect time to guide them elsewhere.

Search Engine Optimization

You may ask, why should this concern you? Well, the higher your article ranks in the search engines, the more people will end up reading it. There are a few simple steps you can follow to help support your articles in this way.

Write for your readers. Make your article interesting and useful. The longer your readers stay on your page the more the search engines will see that it is interesting and push up your page in its rankings (yes, the search engines know how long readers spend on your pages). If the reader bookmarks, shares or “likes” your article, the search engines will also see this and push it up in its rankings. But don’t ramble. Be concise and captivating. People are busy these days and want the information they are seeking quickly, and delivered to them in an engaging way. You should also grab their attention in the first sentence, and then maintain their interest.

Once you have written an excellent article, think about your important keywords. If it is about fly fishing in shady, river areas, make sure you mention those important keywords a few times. But don’t overdo it, because the search engines don’t like “keyword stuffing” and penalize a page if it is over a certain percentage. Stuff gently, or just be aware of your keywords while writing your article and let them surface naturally.

Use your keywords in your title, and write your title to capture attention. Your title will appear in the search results, so the more captivating it is the more surfers will click on your link as opposed to the others. If your WP permalinks are set up properly, your title will also end up in the page’s url/address, such as “Tips to fly fishing in shady river areas” will become http://…/tips-to-fly-fishing-in-shady-river-areas/“.

A popular WP plugin is “All in One SEO Pack” and will appear as the picture below when in the article editing view.

Copy your title into the Title section here. The Description is what will appear under the title in the search results. Ideally you will include your important keywords here as well, but make a useful and not very long description (because there is only a certain amount of room on the search results page). Consider it as your hard sell to the surfer, to convince them to click on your link.

The keywords section should include all your important keywords, separated by a comma, but include important phrases as well, such as:

fly,fishing,fly fishing,river,shade,shady river

List your most important words first.

copy/write these keywords into your tags.

Try to break up your article into useful sections with headings (paragraph styles), and try to include your important keywords in these headings.

If inserting pictures make sure to use your keywords for the Alternate Text, as explained in the inserting pictures section above. Do not use exactly the same alternate text for each picture, as google could consider this spammy and penalize your page, so at least add a different number at the end.

Link out to useful pages from yours. Search engines don’t like dead end pages, but ones that flow elsewhere. If possible, try to link out from your important keywords, and link to pages which rank high in those keywords. It is a good idea to link to stable pages, such as wikipedia’s, as pages with dead links (if the pages you link to eventually cease to exist or change their address) are penalized somewhat by the search engines.

Formatting and Fonts of Paragraphs and Headings

If you are the administrator of your WP account you will want to select a style which is appropriate to the site’s topic. Assuming you have chosen a theme you are happy with (you can change themes, even after submitting many pages, as your posts will remain but only the presentation change) you can now tweak the theme to your flavour. Under the Appearance menu you may find Theme Options, if your theme supports that. Or you can try the Editor. But working with the online editor can be tediously slow, so if you have FTP access to your server you can download all the theme files, which are usually located in

<website domain.com>/wp-content/themes/<name of theme>/

Myra, Turkey, near where Santa Claus was born and died. More at travelgoof.com.

On your server you can zip the theme folder and download it to your computer. With Total Commander you run a search for text within multiple files. Many times the choice of default fonts and sizes for paragraphs is found in a file called style.css. Especially if your theme does not have an options page – make sure to check that first.

Do the same for headings 1, 2 and 3. Choose sizes and styles that will make reading pleasant. Make sure your font size is not too small and make everything pleasant for your readers. Run a search for “css paragraph styles” or “css font styles”, such as this page. You can indent the first line, adjust the space (margin) above and below your paragraphs and headings. Play around with this, as it will affect all your posts and pages.

In the beginning, there was light, and Yahoo shined above all the others. To get web traffic and to the top of Yahoo’s search results it was important to be admitted into its directory. A link from their directory is still very powerful, but mostly they charge for that service now.

Along came google with a new formula, whereby a website was judged by the number of links pointing to it. Each link pointing to a website is like a positive vote. Why else would someone link to another page from theirs if the page they were linking to did not serve some useful purpose?

This concept has been labeled PageRank, whereby the higher a page’s ranking evaluation (0 is the lowest and 10 is the highest), the higher it will show up in google’s search results. This is because the webpage’s pagerank is taken into consideration in google’s algorithm (a long, mathematical formula used to compute the ranking of pages according to the keywords searched) when it is deciding which order to rank pages in.

This formula proved very effective and soon people realized that they were getting better search results with google than they were with Yahoo, so they started switching on mass.

Of course, webmasters caught on quickly too and it became an industry to build “backlinks” – which are links from other websites to yours (if you are the webmaster). All sorts of services sprouted which were designed to accumulate these backlinks for a webmaster. Perhaps it was a submission to 500 directories for a fee of $50. Many such directories sprouted up and included automated systems which made submission to them easier. A domain, such as ezinearticles.com, can be purchased for as little as $12 a year. This means someone can set up an automated directory, then use the programming scripts to do the same but on many other domains. The services which automatically submit links for their clients do so on many of these automated directories, while the directories themselves try to earn an income by including google ads on each of their pages. A single page might mention only a link to your site, with the title and description text, while you have the option to pay extra to push your link to a more prominent, visible and higher traffic location in their directory.

All these sorts of gimmicks and tricks were designed to take advantage of the google pagerank system in order to elevate a page’s ranking in google’s search results. Afterall, how often do you look past the first page of 10 results when surfing the internet? If you are not on the first page, or even in the top few links, much fewer people will actually stumble on your site.

But along comes Panda and Penguin. No, these are not two animals wishing to build links to their little cove in nature, but an adjustment in google’s algorithm to battle against these tactics. After all, google became much more successful than yahoo precisely because its formula for search results was more accurate and successful. But if everyone jumps on the bandwagon and starts to frantically build backlinks, it distorts the original concept in favor of those who practice this strategy. Links are no longer an honest vote and reflection of a website’s usefulness, but can be considered as spam intended to distort google’s search results in someone’s favor.

These tactics would negatively affect google’s business strategy, which is based on producing quality and accurate results, so in the spring of 2012 it rolled up its sleeves and unrolled a few tweaks to its algorithm designed to negatively affect such spammers, while giving a boost to those websites following more honest practices and which seem to be of legitimate quality.

Of course this spelt absolute disaster for many who had intensively practiced such deceitful tactics, and many are still struggling to recover and save face in the eyes of google.

Link Exchanges

One strategy how to build backlinks is by exchanging links with other websites. You link to their page from yours, they link back to you, and you both benefit equally. Ideally, you want to exchange links with websites which are thematically related to yours. For example, if your website is about dog food, you will probably not want to exchange links with your direct competition, but perhaps with a dog food store in another city, or with a dog pound. Definitely not with a site about Viagra. The words on their website should be similar to the ones on yours.

But google caught onto this as well, so if you have a partner.html page from which you link to the homepages of your link exchange partners, while your partners have the same and from which they link to your home page, it looks a little obvious that this is manipulated and google can easily cancel out any positive affect from such an exchange, even though such a strategy worked in the past. Such a link is called a “two-way exchange”, and is easily discernable. You may still get some positive affect from it, but with the new rules probably not very much.

Ideally you want to work with three-way exchanges, such as if you link from a page in your domain to the homepage or deep page of your partner’s domain, while they would link from a page in that domain to a page of another domain you own. Or perhaps they would link to one of your partners, and they in turn link back to you. Such linking would not be so obvious and it would be difficult for google to consider as spam or discredit it.

Also, it is not so effective to link from a “partner” page, full of single links to all sorts of other pages, because google can easily understand the purpose of such a page and also discredit its value. Or simple links at the bottom of your pages pointing out in different directions.

No, the most powerful link would be directly from within the text of a page. Such as a long article about how to take care of a dog, with a link to your store when “dog food” is mentioned. Or perhaps you could create a sponsor box, with some brief text about dog food and link out from that. That way your readers will see it is an advertisement, not get offended if they click on “dog food” from within your text (because they might expect to read more and useful information about dog food – not just get pushed to some product sell), while google could perceive that as some other text within your article (although it might make some assumptions and partially discredit it).

There is a lot of talk on the internet now about backlinking and many have different opinions. I believe you simply need to be more careful and less obvious, but use your mathematical intuition to understand the limitations of any algorithm which google might develop to attack such practices. Best is to be subtle, but to whatever degree google decides to discredit a link, chances are it will not be discredited completely and it will always pay to focus on developing quality backlinks, than to do nothing.

However, one major problem in developing link exchanges, which can be a rather time consuming process, is if your link partner is dishonest and removes their link to you after some time, assuming you will not bother to constantly check that they are still linking back to you. If they remove their link to you, it means you are linking only to them, which is considered a one-way link – the most prized of all links.

Or another nasty trick is if they add a “nofollow” relation to their link to you. This is a command to the search engines not to follow the link to your website, meaning it is almost the same as removing the link. Except that you will still see it and may think your link partner remains honest.

There are several nasty tricks webmasters can use to bend the link exchange game in their favour, such as adding a NOINDEX or NOFOLLOW meta in their headers, which would essentially tell any search engine to ignore all the contents on that page.

Additionally, try not to arrange link exchanges when either of you are sending emails from a gmail account. Google owns gmail and, based on its privacy policy in the past, you can rest assured it might use your correspondence to hone in on link exchange agreements. Especially when you write in an email: “I’ll link from such and such a page, you link to this one of mine,” and within a week the respective links appear on your webpages.

Because it takes time to email with potential link exchange partners, find and approach potential partners, log your agreements somewhere and then add the link to one of your pages, it is a good idea to use a link exchange tool which would automate much of this work and immediately inform you as soon as a link partner tries something dishonest.

If you are a new or expanding translation agency in need of acquiring more translators for your increasing workload, there are several options available to you. One is to post your projects on such portals as proz.com and translatorscafe.com. For every translator who responds to your posts you can respond with an auto email in which you request that they fill in your translator application form if they are interested in receiving more translation work in the future. Keep doing this for every one of your projects and start engaging your new applicants.

There are also mailing lists where you can contact many translators directly, such as Radek Pletka’s Weekly Translation Jobs list, or Yahoo Groups such as tr_jobs or jobs-translators. In this way you can write an invitation to thousands of translators, one which will land directly in their email box, asking them to fill in your translator application form.

And lastly, you can freely signup to receive applications from translators directly through such services as the Translation Directory and our own. Or get serious and simply purchase a large translator database, complete with all their details, as many translators, especially the more busy and better quality ones, simply do not have the time or interest to fill in application forms anymore. Such databases can be imported directly into your own (although some modification may be required), giving you immediate access to the industry’s best.

You never know when you will land a major project and, if you are already bursting at the seems, better to prepare yourself ahead of time.

Why Acquire a Database or List of Email Addresses of Translators

To prepare oneself for potential expansion it is important in any industry to prepare oneself because the “opportunity cost” (the cost of lost earnings can be equated to present costs incurred) of future lost work can be much greater than the preparation costs. After 20 years of running a translation company I know that mega projects occasionally come around. To win a tender price and scheduled delivery time play major factors. To win the contract one has a temptation to overextend themselves in order to win the large, profitable contracts, and in the hustle to find the necessary resources quality can be compromised. If you do not achieve the goals you promised, not only may you lose a long term and valuable client, for good, but you scar your company’s name in their eyes and it is possible they will choose to dock you of the agreed sum paid or not even pay you at all. The translation business is a very competitive industry, as 85% of the world’s population speaks at least two languages, and many of these people would love to earn a living by these means because they can reap the benefits from such a profession: the convenience of working from the comfort of their home, not to mention the lucrative benefits. These days it is not a problem to create a website for one’s services, and at the time of writing this article a search for “translation” yielded towards a billion results (very high compared to many other searches). All these webpages, whether they were prepared by a large, established corporation or by a single freelancer, all represent competition. Sure, there are other ways to find customers than through the search engines, but competition is competition and if you want to stay ahead of that, it is better to be prepared.